From EarthSky News we get “Earth’s magnetic field is known to have flipped many times throughout our planet’s history. Its dipole magnetic field, like that of a bar magnet, remains about the same intensity for thousands to millions of years, and then – for incompletely known reasons – it occasionally weakens and reverses direction. That weakening and reversal was supposed to take on the order of several thousand years. A new study by an international team of scientists, however, demonstrates that the last magnetic reversal – 786,000 years ago – actually happened very quickly, in less than 100 years, or roughly the span of a modern human lifetime.”

For some reason the idea of the earth’s magnetic field flips me out. Do the waters of the ocean fall out all over space? Will Mother Space Nature get upset by the mess created by Earth in her magnetic field turning time? Will the trees start to grow roots in air? What exactly happens when the magnetic field flips?